Life is a Near-Death Experience
by meganechan720
Summary: When Steve is found in the ice his body is curled protectively around... nothing. His daemon is gone. Dead. The scientific community is baffled, but Steve just feels like there's a hole where his soul used to be. Other daemons try to comfort him as best they can, but it's not the same. Nothing will ever be the same. Daemon AU


She'd been a sparrow.

That was why people assumed she was still there. The story of the time he'd gained the upper hand in an alley fight by pretending that his daemon was gone was practically legend by now, so people gave him a double-take when they saw him alone but then immediately got a look of realization and smiled knowingly. It hurt like being stabbed every time. She wasn't high up in the air or hidden in his coat. She was just gone.

When Stark dared him to quit hiding his daemon and face him two on two, Steve just about lost it. The only thing that saved him from getting a punch in the face from a fist engineered by the best scientist the world had ever known was the lurch of the helicarrier being hit with an explosive. When Stark eventually found out he got pale and gripped the antlers of his musk deer daemon so hard his knuckles turned white. He never apologized verbally, but Steve understood anyway.

Her name was—is—was—

* * *

Daemons talk to him now.

It's... weird, but not entirely in a bad way. Natasha's mink daemon (or is he a ferret?) even goes so far as to sit near him, tail twitching every so often, the heat of him warming Steve's arm where it rests on the table. They never touch, but his presence is appreciated. Malka makes pop culture references and then explains them to him, recommends music and movies and food until Tony whines at her to stop dividing his concentration like that and come help him. Bruce's Amalie says good morning and would you like some pancakes and did you read that article in the paper today. Even Fury's raven, who never speaks at all, looks him dead in the eye alongside Fury's piercing stare. (That one's a little disconcerting, actually.)

None of it helps.

Steve has grieved before, many times. He's felt, many times, like there was a hole in his chest where someone used to be, but he hadn't known before how figurative that feeling had been. There is _literally_ a piece of him missing, and it preys on him constantly. There is never a moment where he forgets, never a minute's distraction. He copes, mostly by putting one foot in front of the other and reminding himself to eat, to sleep, to breathe.

When the Winter Soldier takes off his mask and it's _Bucky_, Steve feels that hole tear open wider, but only in anticipation of being filled.

* * *

They find him, months later, shivering in a warehouse. He manages to shoot three of the former SHIELD agents that had volunteered to help Steve in his search, but they eventually capture him and take him back to Stark tower for containment. They learn two things from this incident: one, the Winter Soldier was never designed for long-term deployment, and two, Bucky's daemon had indeed been severed.

She'd been a doberman, mean-looking and fiercely protective, but an utter softy to people she and Bucky liked. Steve had missed her as much as he'd missed Bucky, and finding out she is gone but Bucky is still here is like being torn in half.

The Winter Soldier just stares at Steve from where he's strapped to the bed, eyes hard and wary, tracking Steve's every movement. He looks like an animal. Steve can't even tell if he remembers their battle on the helicarrier. He doesn't speak. He won't eat.

Occasionally, very occasionally, he glances away, like a man communicating with his daemon when he can't see her, and it stops Steve's heart every time.

* * *

Amalie clutches Steve's pant leg gently while Bruce takes his blood. She's a two-toed sloth, but she changes into a gorilla when Bruce changes into the Hulk. It had creeped Steve right out at first, but she's so slow and gentle that it's nearly impossible to be afraid of her. She tells him of how Bruce, once he realized she changed when he did, began researching daemons and their connection to their people. If anyone can figure out how Steve survived when—when his—when—

If anyone can figure out how Steve survived, it's him. And any insight Bruce can gain from him can potentially help Bucky, and that's all Steve cares about. Amalie's serene presence helps keep him calm, but even so, it's a relief to be told Bruce is done and he can sprint back to the room Bucky's being held in.

The thing is, Steve may be able to physically feel the hole where his daemon used to be, but he doesn't, in point of fact, have any of the symptoms of someone with a severed daemon. The horrible research done in places like Auschwitz has provided the medical community with plenty of ill-gotten knowledge being put to good purpose, and though the practice of severing daemons as a form of torture is far more common today than it was seventy years ago (Steve is horrified to learn), victims are also better able to cope and reintegrate into society than they used to be. Prosthetic daemons, for instance, are an option he has been presented with and summarily rejected. Though he knows he would normally find the progress made in this area heartening, in his present circumstances, Steve isn't sure his generation's method of dealing with a severed person (quietly turning a blind eye to suicide attempts) wasn't kinder, on the balance. He has toyed with suicide and rejected it also, if only because death is a likelihood rather than a possibility in his line of work, and he might as well do some good before he goes.

Now that Bucky is back (in one form or another) he is glad he chose to stick it out.

* * *

It's not as though he doesn't see Yatima in every doberman he sees, daemon or pet. But the instant she slinks warily out from behind an alleyway and into his line of sight, he knows she's not someone's pet, and he knows she's not someone else's daemon. It's her. It's no one and nothing else but her. And he doesn't even stop to think about how it could be before falling to his knees, both because his legs won't support him anymore and because she's trotting slowly up to him and somehow he doesn't care one bit that he's clutching another man's daemon to him and sobbing in pubic.

She lets him carry her back to the tower because she isn't tall enough for him to keep a hand on her as she walks and neither of them want to let go of the other just yet. When he walks in the room Bucky stares back and forth between the two of them with the wildest eyes Steve's seen from him yet. Eventually it becomes clear that she isn't getting down and Bucky isn't making any moves to try to go to her, restraints notwithstanding. He kneels down carefully so Yatima can stand on her own, but she just hunches in the lee of his arms and doesn't move.

"Yati," Steve murmurs, and she turns away and buries her head in his shoulder, and refuses to even look at Bucky no matter what he says.

* * *

Bruce proclaims, to the shock and consternation of them all, that Yatima and Bucky have not been severed, but _separated_, and Steve feels vindicated when his exclamation at the impossibility of such a thing outside of myths about witches is echoed by Tony. Apparently, unlike some things, separation hasn't become any more possible than it was when he was frozen.

Except there she is, a daemon standing over three hundred yards and several floors away from her person, tail tucked between her legs and head bowed almost to the ground. Steve can feel people's eyes flicking to his hand on her neck, but no one comments and he does not move his hand. It should feel weirder to be touching someone else's daemon, but all it feels is natural and safe. They are both of them broken in two and left alone, and Steve feels no shame in finding what little comfort they can from each other.

Bruce, of course, wants to do all kinds of tests on both Bucky and Yatima, but Steve puts his foot down and refuses any tests for either of them until they've been properly reunited, which Bruce acquiesces to with a nod of his head and an absent hand around Amalie's back where she is clinging to him, staring softly at Steve and Yatima.

Yatima spends the night in Steve's bed, his arms wrapped tightly around her, the hole in himself aching from where she is resting against the edges of it, the fit imperfect but so, so much better than being left gaping and empty. She whimpers in her sleep, and each time she wakes she licks Steve's face one time and buries her head in his shoulder again. Come morning she whispers to him of decades spent wandering, wondering where Bucky was, why she wasn't dead, why she didn't seem to age, mourning Bucky, mourning Steve, mourning—

Steve gulps down a breath before she can say her name, and she licks his face once and continues.

When she saw in newspapers and overheard in conversations that Steve had survived, she struggled to make it across oceans and contested borders to find him, and last of all she tells him of the horrible shock of finding Bucky as he is now, empty and wild and broken and yet still somehow able to be without her. Steve squeezes her and tells her in turn of Bucky's ghost-like existence, his mind being erased over and over again, the possibility that he has permanent brain damage and may never fully recover. But he also tells her of Bucky's recognition of him on the helicarrier, the fact that he should never have survived the crash, the trace of a boot print they found next to him in the mud where he'd apparently washed up on the river shore. She whines with painful hope, and then gets up, facing him with her shoulders squared and her head held erect.

"I should go to him," she says, and Steve's heart breaks and is remade in one brief, intense moment.

* * *

Steve almost can't physically bear to watch Yatima slowly sidle up to Bucky, tense and clearly ready to run. Bucky just stares at her, breathing a little faster than normal, not moving a muscle until she is standing right next to the bed, and then he works his arm furiously, trying to break free of the restraints they still have to keep him in. Steve glances at the guard, who looks a little sick to his stomach and definitely too nervous to cross the room, so Steve takes matters into his own hands and goes and unbuckles Bucky's right arm, his real arm.

His hand lashes out like a snake, grabbing on to Yatima's scruff so hard she yelps, but then she is whining and licking Bucky's face and scrabbling onto the bed to lie on top of him, and he is staring at her with bewildered eyes, clutching her as tight as he can, and he says the first thing he's said since they brought him here:

"Tima."

Steve has to leave then, joy mixing painfully with grief until he feels he might boil over with it.

* * *

Bucky's recovery after that is nothing short of miraculous. He starts talking, starts remembering, starts eating on his own. The first time he looks at Steve and says softly, "Till the end of the line, pal," Steve just breaks down and cries, and he knows the Winter Soldier is Bucky once again because he collars Steve with his arm just like he used to and just holds him there, Yatima leaning heavily against his leg.

Things were always going to be strange, with decades of torture and brain-washing to work through, but they're made even stranger by the fact that Steve now knows Yatima better than Bucky does. Once when she comes up quietly beside him and licks his hand Bucky startles so badly he hits her, and Yatima spends the rest of the day with Steve while Bucky sits and shakes and refuses to let anyone near him. They spend a lot of time with a therapist just getting to know each other again, and Steve spends a lot of time refusing to be bitter about it.

The possibility that his own daemon is merely separated and somewhere far away from him has of course crossed his mind, but Steve knows better. She was right there with him when he went down in the ice, his arms held protectively around her, and SHIELD found him frozen in that exact position, arms curled around nothing. They searched for miles around the crash site, but there was nothing to be found. She's just gone and somehow he's still here. Bruce's working theory is that the serum had made his body hardy enough to keep going despite only having half a soul, which also explains Bucky. There have been attempts made throughout history to find a way to separate daemons from their people, but so far anyone who has managed to get physically far enough from their daemon to do it has only found themselves severed. Bruce mentions far more casually than such an observation deserves that organizations like HYDRA would probably kill for the secret to separation, so they should probably keep the particulars of Bucky's condition a secret. All Steve can do is numbly agree.

* * *

Sam is sometimes his only comfort. Steve can tell he thinks a lot about what it would be like for Riley to come back, and he can watch him quietly accept that he'll never fully understand what Steve is going through. But he's good at being quiet when Steve needs quiet and talkative when that's what Steve needs, and Redwing is respectful and doesn't make eye contact, and he finds that it's actually kind of nice to have at least one daemon that isn't staring at him all the time. He tells Sam about the fact that most of the daemons he knows talk to him on a regular basis, and Sam gets thoughtful.

"There're a few severed vets in my group," he says. "I know it's not the same, but..."

He turns to Redwing, seeking her insight, and she shifts from foot to foot, resettling her wings once or twice before speaking. When she does, she addresses the air in front of them, not either of the men beside her.

"I can't speak for all daemons," she begins cautiously, "but I can feel the... lack, and there's a part of me that wants to fill it. I'm not saying I'd ever... and it's not as though someone else's daemon could ever possibly be adequate, but I'm more the right shape to fill the hole than Sam is, and I can see some daemons trying to fill it, in some small way."

Sam runs his hand down her wing absently, giving comfort with the gesture rather than taking it. Steve looks out over the park they've just run through, children with unsettled daemons playing with their parents, couples with daemons entwined sitting on the grass, and then he looks up at the sky, where real sparrows flit through the trees, and the pang in his soul is just as big as ever, but maybe a little less sharp than it used to be.

* * *

_A musk deer is a miniature deer with tusks that look like fangs, and just don't even ask me how Iron Man flies around with a musk deer because I don't know. _


End file.
